I’ve been a storyteller ever since I was a little girl, but I only started writing stories in Mrs Morris’s fifth grade class. The majority of my stories were about a rich gentlemen who hired two grave robbers to procure for him corpses which he would transform into gustatory delights. Eyeball soup and brain jelly being two such delicacies. Ahem, let’s just say that someone liked grossing out her classmates.

My first “book,” published in Mrs Morris’s class, was about a girl who lived in the Sahara. The details are hazy--probably as hazy as the plot was in the story--but the gist of it was this: She had two horses, Starry Midnight, a black Appaloosa with white spots on its rump, and Scarlet Casanova, a dashing sorrel with a long, flaxen mane and tail. The girl rode Starry to the capital, with Scarlet in tow, where the prince invited her into his palace and fell in love with her. She gifted him with Scarlet Casanova.

Um. Yeah.

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I started in fifth grade also, more despite my class than thanks to it, since it was my second year in Israel. My first "book" was called "To Keep the Peace" and it was about how my British friend Shareen and I prevented a war from breaking out between the UK and the USA by visiting the Queen and Bill Clinton (...) and basically explaining to them why it was a bad idea.

It was highly unrealistic and pretty silly overall, but for a ten-year-old it was pretty impressive :P

My first full-length novel, "Long Journey Home", was written between the ages 12-14 and told the vastly complicated and corny story of an orphan trying to find her family. Later attempts to make it better involved cutting the first third of the story off and trying to start from where she is brought to an orphanage, makes these friends and then runs away with them.

My next novel was the first one I actually tried to get published, and with the perspective of time I can't believe any agent actually took me seriously... but some did! It was about an American teenager who moves to London against her will and meets and falls in love with the fictional Prince of Wales. I mean, seriously. One of the subplots involved her getting kidnapped, him trying ever so nobly to rescue her and ending up kidnapped too.

I guess the only reason it worked somewhat was that it was very funny. The MC was really sarcastic and their back-and-forths were pretty entertaining.

It took me until I was 17-18 to realize how unpublishable it was, and focus instead on my fourth novel, which I still daydream about fixing up and doing something with.

I have a novella that I wrote after it, which I think is more publishable only in that it's tighter and better written than anything else... except that it's totally not, because it's A) a novella B) in a totally undefined genre C)...really weird. I have a kind of love-hate relationship with it.

I have been thinking about an idea I had a while ago that has to do with conversos and the Spanish Inquisition--a passion of mine from years past--but I've changed so much since I was last writing novels, I'm finding it very hard to even know how to go about it. All my characters were around my age at the time of writing, and now that I'm just an "adult"--who lives a life very different from your average audience--it's hard to decide on a perspective that people can identify with.

One of the problems I had was that one of the main points I wanted to make was very... unconventional, something an average audience might find very hard to swallow. But I decided that I could make it work by still driving in that that point in the background story and shifting the focus of the main story. Because really, there's plenty to be said about discovering one's hidden Jewish heritage without getting messed up in ideas about love and romance. And I never liked the female lead character much anyway. :P